Quotes About Translation

I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.

I enjoyed translating half a Bible page, with my mom back in Australia, into Hebrew.

At least when it's in French, I won't know what the heck they're saying.

A lot of scientists are hesitant to get involved with industry. It's seen as, you know, getting in bed with the devil, actually. But I found that doing this has been really the only way and one of the best ways I know to take a finding from the bench side to people.

'Being Cyrus' is very young in language or grammar. I am not saying that these things can't be achieved in Hindi. All I am saying is that it would not be the same.

I've been offered bi-linguals and tri-linguals to be made in Hindi and south languages.

In the English press this was translated into English terms and took this form: that arms were desperately needed on the Aragón front and could not be sent there because the unpatriotic Anarchists were holding them back. To put it like this is to ignore the conditions actually existing in Spain.

After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.

But it is infamous that they have not told you!' declared Eustacie. 'Je n'en reviendrai jamais!' 'If it's all the same to you, miss, I'd just as soon you'd talk in a Christian language,' said Mr. Stubbs.

Is he talking Latin?' said the Yeoman. 'No,' said Hubert, 'but I'll be damned if it's the English my mother taught me.

I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.

I used to be a computer engineer, and I can make really good code, and we can make systems that work really well, and we can make the application a great experience, but when you have to translate bits to atoms, you need folks who are used to working with city governments, with state governments, and so I like to say we're in a political campaign.

English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.

Our minds have to translate magic into symbols we understand.

They set the kindling afire to consume the body of a man who had but one goal—to make the Bible readable for everyone.

Just one question, you arrogant fucking cocksucker" said Locke. "I'll grant the Lamora part is easy to spot; the truth is, I didn't know about the apt translation when I took the name. I borrowed it from this old sausage dealer who was kind to me once, back in Catchfire before the plague. I just liked the way it sounded. "But what the fuck" he said slowly, "ever gave you the idea that Locke was the first name I was actually born with?

The word "BAE" which is popular in North American society is actually the Danish word for poop.

The optimal lens that creates an acceptable amount of distortion is a 50mm lens. This translates into the drawing as a 60º Cone of Vision. How is this determined? Every lens has a degree of visible area assigned to it and 60º is close to what is seen through a 50mm lens.

... but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. from Disappearance of Literature

The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages.

I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the author considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me quite a nice compliment - but if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment.